1 Getting started

 

This chapter covers

  • Why should you read this book?
  • Importance of writing idiomatic and testable code
  • Presenting Go's prominent features

Go is a modern and simple programming language that makes it convenient for individuals and distributed teams to work together to develop efficient, adaptable, maintainable, and scalable software that harnesses the full power of today's multi-core CPU systems.

This chapter explores the book's goals, introduces Go, and showcases its key features without delving fully into Go's mechanics and idioms; I'll leave the details to other chapters.

Let's take a look at why you should read this book and what you can expect from it.

1.1 Why should you read this book?

Getting up to speed with Go is so straightforward that in 2020, I tweeted:

"Go is easy to learn. Hard to master."

Experienced programmers can learn the basics of Go in just a week. Yet, using Go to its full potential requires a deep understanding of its idioms and mechanics.

So, this book has three practical goals:

  1. Learning by example.
  2. Crafting idiomatic and readable code in Go.
  3. Crafting testable and maintainable code in Go.

Let's dive into each.

1.1.1 Learn by example

1.1.2 Crafting idiomatic code

1.1.3 Crafting testable code

1.2 Why Go?

1.3 Hello, gophers!

1.3.1 Statically and strongly typed

1.3.2 Compilation and static binary

1.3.3 Go Runtime

1.4 Concurrency

1.4.1 Goroutines

1.4.2 Go scheduler

1.4.3 Channels

1.5 Type system

1.5.1 Composition instead of inheritance

1.5.2 Implicit interfaces

1.5.3 Testing with implicit interfaces

1.6 Standard Library

1.7 Tooling

1.8 Outro

1.8.1 Source code

1.8.2 Initialize your environment

1.9 Summary